"After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate."

If you wish to start working on your own vision of the desktop, be that a fork of KDE4 or a porting of KDE3 to Qt4 or a new desktop UI on top of libplasma or something from scratch or whatever, just let us know and I'll make sure you get svn accounts so you can do your work in KDE's svn if you so wish.

It's really that simple.

And yes, Plasma makes this ridiculously simple to do, if one decides to go that route.

Unfortunately, I expect to see no actual effort ever emerge. =/ That would be so much more useful than talking about it since we could each then just compare results side by side.

If you wish to start working on your own vision of the desktop, be that a fork of KDE4 or a porting of KDE3 to Qt4 or a new desktop UI on top of libplasma or something from scratch or whatever, just let us know and I'll make sure you get svn accounts so you can do your work in KDE's svn if you so wish.

It's really that simple.

And yes, Plasma makes this ridiculously simple to do, if one decides to go that route.

Unfortunately, I expect to see no actual effort ever emerge. =/ That would be so much more useful than talking about it since we could each then just compare results side by side.

I'd be more impressed with the sentiments when the Konqueror teams just uses WebKit, works with the rest of that community, including Trolltech, and just makes us Web Developers confident that coding to Standards that WebKit have stableized means I will have sites look clean on Konqueror, Safari, Epiphany, OmniWeb, Shiira, not to mention the other WebKit based browsers leaving us to only really care about how Gecko is working with our code.

I left IE out intentionally as the less we support it the more willing they are to move to supporting the W3C standards.

But as you mentioned, we could create a parallel UI paradigm approach to the Kdelibs/Kdebase foundation but then again one can always synch up KDE Trunk with a fork and eventually bring it out as alpha, beta and gamma releases.

I think you're rightly concerned that doing such will create two separate communities and give the KDE community two subcommunities leaving the KDE Devs in far less control of their vision thus crippling the point of KDE 4.

I'd be more impressed with the sentiments when the Konqueror teams just uses WebKit

it's actually not the "konqueror team" that makes this decision. once there is a working WebKit kpart out there (slow progress being made on it) then the market can make this decision very easily.

and this topic has nothing to do with the khtml/webkit stuff.

oh, wait it does: we use webkit in plasma. there! on topic again!

But as you mentioned, we could create a parallel UI paradigm approach to the Kdelibs/Kdebase foundation but then again one can always synch up KDE Trunk with a fork and eventually bring it out as alpha, beta and gamma releases.

one could create a parallel UI paradigm inside of the kdeplasmoids package for all i care =) there's really no need to even branch things.

I think you're rightly concerned that doing such will create two separate communities and give the KDE community two subcommunities leaving the KDE Devs in far less control of their vision thus crippling the point of KDE 4.

i don't think i ever said that. please don't put words in my mouth or thoughts in my head =)

so .. it could create subcommunities, but i don't think that would be a bad thing at all. diversity is fine.